One of the great things about outsourcing some of your startup company tasks is that you can leave them to work on their tasks without much supervision. However, there will often be that nagging urge to step in and manage your outsourced teams more directly.
That isn’t bad per se, as any business wants to ensure that external parties are doing their assigned tasks. But it can be disruptive, as your partner might feel like you are constantly looming over their heads. So, how do you maintain a certain degree of autonomy for your outsourced teams while still effectively overseeing them?
The Challenge Of Ensuring Autonomy During Startup Company Outsourcing
To better understand the challenge of maintaining the autonomy of your outsourced teams, you should know how they influence your work. If you would recall, one of the reasons why companies outsource is so that they can return to doing the more essential business activities.
However, this also creates a situation known as dependent autonomy. To continue enjoying that opportunity, you depend on the outsourcing provider’s ability to do its work. Thus, it would be in your best interest to ensure that they accomplish the tasks.
Image from Paymo.
That fuels the urge to exercise more control over your outsourced teams. You become more invested in seeing your outsourced partner accomplish its task. What starts as just increased monitoring can eventually develop into full-on control.
The Effects Of Micromanagement Within Your Startup Company
You might wonder why increased control is a bad idea if it would mean that you ensure that work is done. However, as with your in-house employees, it can negatively impact the performance of your outsourced team.
Decreased Productivity
It’s ironic since you outsource to boost productivity. But micromanagement can end up creating the opposite effect. Here, your outsourced team can feel restricted and unable to perform at its best. That results in them not being able to deliver the results you want.
But it goes beyond just affecting their quantitative output. You also end up limiting their creativity. Because of that, you can’t draw from the innovation these providers can give.
Strained Relationship With Provider
That feeling of being constantly monitored also causes your provider to feel as if you don’t trust them. It will significantly affect your long-term relationship with them. While they would still strive to deliver what you have contracted them for, there would be less enthusiasm on their part.
It can also lead to a faster turnover, as the provider might decide not to pursue an extension in their contract. Remember that these providers also factor their existing relationship with clients in their decision to stay. And if they don’t, you have to deal with continuity issues for the work they left behind.
How Your Startup Company Can Maintain The Autonomy Of Outsourced Teams
Your main challenge when providing more autonomy for your outsourced teams is achieving the balance between it and proper monitoring. What makes that hard is that not every task you outsource is the same. Thus, they might require different levels of autonomy and monitoring to be effective.
A handy concept you can turn to here is WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg’s Five Levels of Autonomy for distributed work. It is a way for you to categorize each task into a hierarchy for the kind of autonomy you provide. Mullenweg developed the concept for remote and distributed work in general. But it will be especially handy for managing outsourced teams.
Image from Matt Mullenweg.
Level Zero
While it is known as Five Levels, the system actually begins with a Level Zero. It is the work where you need to be physically present. That typically includes on-site manual labor. However, companies might also designate other kinds of work as level zero if they deem it necessary for completion.
Level One
This level is the kind of work where there is no effort to make it remote-friendly. Often, that will only be an option in case of emergencies. There would also be the expectation that everyone would be back in the office in a few days. Thus, the autonomy given to team members can vary depending on the circumstances.
Level Two
Here, remote work is going to be longer than was initially expected. That is the situation that companies found themselves in during the COVID-19 pandemic, which also necessitated more outsourcing. Because of that, companies found the need to transition into a more remote setup. However, all work engagements would still be synchronous and real-time communication would still be the norm, such as through video conferencing.
Note that level two is where companies become more anxious about productivity. That is due to it being somewhat of a transition stage where there would be a lot of adjustments. Because of this, they would often insist on additional monitoring tools. However, that also creates a lot of friction, since the remote teams are also adjusting to the situation. As such, you need to dial down on that urge.
Level Three
The third level is where the company and its outsourced teams become more comfortable with a remote setup. Because of that, the company might start investing in things that facilitate a more autonomous arrangement. For instance, they might start looking for more effective means of communication to augment or supersede current synchronous channels. Written communication becomes particularly vital, as it allows team members to trade information quickly without needing face-to-face engagements.
Level Four
Once you reach level four, the work becomes truly asynchronous. Here, the way your startup company evaluates the outsourced team becomes different. You focus on what they can produce instead of how or when they were able to deliver it. You also become more trusting of their judgment.
Image from Velocity Global
At this point, you also need to become more willing to provide them with greater autonomy. After all, you already trust that they can deliver. Make sure that any form of monitoring is ideally minimal and that they will not need too much effort to comply. For instance, you can go by with just voluntary updates and basic time tracking if needed.
Level Five
This level, which Mullenweg dubbed nirvana, is when you become more competent in a remote setup than when your startup company is in an in-person arrangement. It is also where your teams, including outsourced ones, become fully autonomous. They coordinate to do a project by themselves, with you providing only the initial instructions and final review of their work.
Note that this is an idealized version of remote work. But you can strive to bring at least part of your work to that level. Here, choose which tasks would benefit the most from that degree of autonomy.
Boosting Autonomy Will Boost Your Startup Company Outsourcing Effort
Using the above model will help you map out which of your outsourced tasks would require a certain degree of autonomy. From there, you and your outsourcing partner can plan what level of monitoring would suffice.
One thing to keep in mind is that your ability to maintain autonomy for your outsourced teams relies on the trust you have in them. Thus, you need to ensure that the partner you get is indeed trustworthy. We at Virtua Solutions have earned the trust of numerous clients throughout the years. As such, you can be sure that we can complete tasks without you having to monitor us constantly. Sign up today and boost your startup company.